61–70 of 101 posts
For me, IRC stopped being attractive when Freenode changed owner. They broke it in two months and with no way to migrate nicks between servers, many lost their registered nicks on the channels that moved to other servers, and I had no want to stay on Freenode for the channels that stayed.
Identity is a major problem with IRC. Losing mine cut a core tether for me, it wasn't my space any more.
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IRC is terrible for work collaboration. I say this as a long time IRC user. Conversations are not searchable, and if you're offline you are unable to follow along with what's going on with your colleagues. To make it anywhere near usable, you need to run IRC bouncers, chat loggers, search indexers .. at that point, just use something made for collaboration.
I don’t want searchable chat, I want my coworkers to write actual documentation. Ephemerality is a feature in this case.
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But it was already kinda fringe, even back in the late 90's. People would talk on AIM or AOL chat, but it was rarer to find IRC users among the hoi polloi.
IRC was home to a lot of gaming communities, it was basically Discord before that existed. There used to be live commentary in channels (Twitch replaced this). I don’t believe any gamers use it today but fringe-tech communities still use it, I think that’s what the parent is referring to.
Ah, Xircon, Quakenet and Counter-Strike. Those were the days.
The protocol won't die, but the people will. For me, IRC stopped being attractive when Freenode changed owner. They broke it in two months and with no way to migrate nicks between servers, many lost their registered nicks on the channels that moved to other servers, and I had no want to stay on Freenode for the channels that stayed. Identity is a major problem with IRC. Losing mine cut a core tether for me, it wasn't…
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Any company which goes to the lengths of setting up an IRC server would find it trivial to also set up a bouncer and search index for that server. That said, these days a Matrix Synapse instance would be an easier choice.
Worked at Red Hat, the amount of anger around decommissioning our internal IRC servers was HUGE (and hell, even then, half the company was using/happy with GChat, the other half on Slack. People who actually paid attention to both were very minority).
Also, at red hat, we’d complain to the whole company about paper towels vs air dryers in the bathrooms, so naturally the complaints about losing IRC would be expected! It’s refreshing to be at a place where I can make a decision without getting second guessed and derailed by someone totally unrelated to what I’m doing.
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Funny, I think the exact opposite. All social spaces are about the people/community, which mostly adapts itself around whatever space they happen to be around, be it a park, shopping map, IRC, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. What's special about IRC is that it's really easy to set up. If all of the social platforms collapsed, you could set up and use IRC with your group of friends until the next social platform bl…
The biggest weirdness on IRC compared to all other platforms is that you NEED to be online 24/7 with your client or you'll miss stuff. There is no "backlog" except for the one you see yourself. On the other hand it's a good thing, people can't just join and scroll down 10 years of chat history. But you'll also be completely unfindable unless your client is online.
I prefer to instead run irssi+otr in a GNU screen session from a random VM/VPS provider. Most others prefer tmux. I'm just stuck in the past I suppose for using GNU screen.
[1a] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/
[1b] - https://convos.chat/
[2a] - https://github.com/thelounge
[2b] - Demo: https://demo.thelounge.chat/#/connect
Funny that they mention freenode because it did burn to the ground 2 years after this article. However it was reborn as Libera which is once again doing great. If you don't know the story, Google it. I don't want to drag up the past, it's better forgotten. I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is.
IRC feels more fringe, but it's actually held up surprisingly well. According to the stats, it's currently about half as popular as it was in 2000 when I started[1]. That's better than I would have guessed. [1] https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2024